Forgotten (not so) Great Moments in Movie History

Near the conclusion of the 1980 comic cultural touchstone “Airplane!”, as the eponymous aircraft attempts to make an emergency landing, the scene momentarily cuts to a cityscape highlighted by a broadcast tower with the illuminated red letters bearing the station’s call sign: WZAZ. “WZAZ!” an offscreen dee jay hiply hollers. “Where disco lives forever!” In the instantaneous aftermath of this declaration, however, the airplane clips the broadcasting tower, knocking out the signal. Disco, in other words, is dead. Indeed, in the most recent episode of his podcast Hit Parade, where he performs illuminating, entertaining deep dives into Billboard Chart history, and which got me thinking about everything that led to this post, Chris Molanphy cites this scene as a symbolic representation of when disco faded from the public’s consciousness.

Except, of course, as Molanphy noted later in the episode, eventually, because everything is cyclical, because everything comes back around, the 70s made something of a comeback in the 90s. Fashion trends of the 1970s were revived, just like fashion trends of the 1990s are being revived now, and inevitably “That 70s Show”, which debuted in 1998, epitomized this resurgence. Why my girlfriend my senior year of high school and I rented “Saturday Night Fever” to show the German foreign exchange student in our class because we thought it held the cultural key to America, or something. Quentin Tarantino, 90s auteur wonderboy, took many of his cues from the 70s, and so many other movies of the decade, even those long since forgotten, like “Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult”, got in on the revival too.

“Airplane!”, of course, was written and directed by the triumvirate known as Team ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker), hence, ahem, WZAZ. The trio would go on to also write 1989’s stone cold comedy classic “The Naked Gun”, with David Zucker directing alone, and the latter Zucker also wrote and directed the 1991 “Naked Gun” sequel, “The Smell of Fear”, which this blog holds in just as high a regard as the original. Zucker gave up the directorial reigns for 1994’s “The Final Insult”, but he did co-write it, signaling at least one Team ZAZ holdover. That is important. And that is important because a flashback in “Naked Gun 33⅓” meant to fill in the backstory of femme fatale Tanya Peters (Anna Nicole Smith) is set in the 70s, triggered by the immortal Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) referencing “The big disco shootout” which allows for both Nielsen and George Kennedy as Captain Ed Hocken to don era-appropriate costumes and the soundtrack to make space for The Bee Gees.

The scene itself is funnier in theory than in practice, sort of emblemizing the overall staleness of the proceedings, though it effectively brings home the inadvertent point anyway. Here was Zucker’s “The Naked Gun 33 1/3” referencing disco’s kitschy resurgence fourteen years after Zucker’s “Airplane!” put WZAZ out of business, suggesting their disco is dead punchline was premature.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

When people remember the immortal Joey, played by then nine year old Rossie Harris, of Team ZAZ's stone cold classic "Airplane!", they remember his innuendo-laden cockpit encounters with Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves). In Will Harris's oral history of "Airplane!" for The AV Club from 2015, Rossie Harris admitted that in playing the part he was unaware of the scene's actual overtones. "I think that that worked to the directors' advantage," Harris explained, "because I really was not reacting to it because I really had no idea what was going on." In contrast, Graves, Harris said, "was very cognizant of the subtleties and the undertones or actual overt overtones of the script, so he was very, very wary. I think he had to be talked into doing it at all. Really, between scenes, he did not want any untoward contact with me and stuff. So he was a bit standoffish."

That description is exactly how it plays on screen. Graves seems like he's in his own world, drifting into some past we want absolutely nothing to do with, while Harris seems like he's in his own world too, all blissfully unaware big eyes. The era into which "Airplane!" arrived was different too. It was 1980, the tail-end of the so-called Golden Age, which sounds weird and wrong, of Skyjacking. Airlines were finally getting around to making it more difficult to board planes with weapons. Still, airline security was not necessarily what it is now, which is underlined, perhaps unintentionally, by a background moment of incredible hilarity. 

This moment arrives after Joey has already been stewarded into the cockpit by the flight attendant, presumably gone back to his seat and now decided to return to the pilots' lair. We know he has returned because as Captain Oveur is busy at the controls, we see Joey enter the cockpit all on his lonesome, without any supervision. 

This is incredible. This is hilarious. This is some little kid just wandering back and forth from cockpit to cabin to cockpit of an in-flight Boeing 707 at his leisure. And notice how Frank Ashmore, playing navigator Victor - "What's our vector, Victor?" - has a small smile, which is left over from when he actually sees Joey just walk right on in without even knocking, like it's sweet as opposed to a potential security breach.

If "Airplane!" were a sitcom I think this would be the sort of moment that would not have even earned a guffaw from the laugh track. I think it would have just slipped right on by. To that point, a few years ago The Telegraph reported on some panel of subscribers to some movie-watching service called Lovefilm that determined "Airplane!" was had the most laughs per minute of any movie (or, the most laughs per minute of the Top 10 comedies chosen by LoveFilm members) coming in at three laughs per minutes. The dubiousness of this research aside, it speaks to the intent of "Airplane!", to pack its run time so full of laughs that if something doesn't land, something else will, or if you miss a laugh, you might see it years later and howl.

It's an important laugh to remember. After all, ten years later, John McClane himself, hero of Nakatomi Tower, would be forcefully escorted out of the tower at Dulles Airport for not having clearance. So let us be sure never to forget "Airplane's!"swift, comical immortalization of a forgotten moment in time when a nine year old could simply waltz into a jetliner's cockpit like it was a hotel lobby.

Choose Your Own Post Election Post

Greetings! The Worst American Presidential Election In History is over! Maybe. Maybe not. I hesitate, of course, because we here at Cinema Romantico are on retreat, far, far away in the northern reaches of Minnesota and away from the Interwebs. And because we are away from the Interwebs we cannot tailor this post to account for exact election results. Still, we did not want to leave you, faithful readers, without some sort of soothing tonic if all went well or rot gut whiskey if everything got blown up, and so we hit on the idea of you providing you both options! Apply as necessary.

BEST CASE

Ah. The election is over. The air smells better, the breeze feels cooler, that headache you simply could not shake for 18 months has finally dissipated, the relentless drone of political punditry has gratefully been switched off and now the lilting nothingness of no polling data can be the metaphorical relaxation CD that lets us lay down for our long overdue national nap.........

WORST CASE 

Welp, they finally did it. They killed the republic of George fucking Washington. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.